April 27, 2010

I enjoyed working with iMovie I really thought it was going to be harder than it what it was. I think it was that we weren’t given a lot of in class time to work on the Project that made the idea of making a movie so daunting. While iMovie is easy to use I would have preferred that there was some PC equivalent, there are a couple of things that I would have liked to fix but I didn’t have access to a Mac outside of the computer lab.And requiring us to use the Macs when we didn’t pay the technology fee to have class in there seems to be punishing the students that don’t own Macs or are Mac savvy.

Working with iMovie was easy but the time it took to upload to YouTube watch the video, see that there were mistakes and then have to go back and rework the movie was tiring. Because the picture was so stop and go in iMovie it made the project take twice as long as it should have.

I know we said this in class but I feel as if I should reiterate it one more time: While the watching some of the slideshows and interviews in class was helpful I feel as if they took time away from when I could have been working on these projects. Having a week to learn a program is going to get us to produce the best that we could. Most days I paid little attention to the slideshows and videos because I didn’t feel as if I was learning anything more.

I like knowing that I can create slideshows and videos if I wanted to, but having done so little work with it I probably won’t try.

April 26, 2010

In the section is Blogging Journalism I found a couple of points that definitely agreed with and there were some that I only half agreed with:

Independent bloggers aren’t journalists because no editor comes between the ‘author and reader.

I do believe that independent bloggers aren’t journalists, but not because there is no editor. I believe that journalists need to be credible and that it is their job to report on something. I won’t believe a story from a blogger the same way I would if it was written by a journalist.

Amateur Journalists are inherently biased

This is part of the proposed code of ethics for blogging. I do believe that this is true, that all bloggers have some sort of bias-ness in their work. Blogging is about telling how you feel on a particular subject, this isn’t going to give you straight facts but how the blogger believes the facts should be interpreted, altering the way the reader perceives the information.

I do like the idea of having a code of ethics for bloggers but I agree with the article, there is not way enforce such a thing.

April 11, 2010

I wished I had known that this Reading was going to be as helpful as it was. I read this after I had shot my Interview, thinking that this was going to be as unhelpful as the rest of the readings. I was wrong.

Since I already shot my Interview I thought I use the reading to go over what I took to see if there was anything that I would have done differently.

I wish I could have had a more interesting background, but when I tried to shoot outside most of the audio was covered by the wind. I did notice after I uploaded the video to iMovie that shooting near a window probably was the brightest idea. I could see the picture darkening and brightening as the sun hide behind clouds and came out again. The reading does day the object do the moving and I hope that goes for the background too.

I think I did place Ian in the video well enough, there isn’t too much space above his head, and I didn’t place him in the center of the frame.

I think this Interview was a lot better than the first video I shot with the camera, I kept playing with all the buttons using the zoom, moving it around and I couldn’t keep my hands steady. So maybe this was a success.

April 1, 2010

I was expecting this article to help me get an ideal of how video has helped or not helped get a story across. I didn’t get that.

I got a story with links to other pages, that made the article more confusing than it should be. Are the links pertinent to the story? Do I have to go to them to know what the rest of the article is talking about? I spent more time on the story about the violinist in the subway than I did reading this article.

Then when I finally did get back to the story I found conflicting statements but no answer was given as to which was correct:

“.. many small and medium-size papers “don’t seem to think long-form videos are worth the effort.

or

“Virtually every paper in the country is, if not diving head first, at least dipping their toes into video.”

Maybe this article was meant to be helpful, but all the links throughout it kept distracting me from actually reading it. I would get to a link, click it, scan through that, and by the time I got back to the original article I had forgotten everything that I had read up to that link.

I am not extremely happy with it, I couldn’t use some of my original photos because they weren’t jpegs and the ones off of flickr are blurry. I think the audio came out really good, I was unsure was to use as background noise and in a couple of them you can here a kid crying but I couldn’t edit that out all the way, without taking some of the audio that I needed.

March 24, 2010

It was very tiresome to read through this one, professional is this and professional is that…it made me confused and I rushed through reading the rest because I didn’t care what a professional is.

The same idea, published in dozens or hundreds of places, can have an amplifying effect that outweighs the verdict from the smaller number of professional outlets.

I liked the story of the senator that said something that wasn’t picked up by the media, but bloggers were able to bring it in to the public eye. The danger here is that just because everyone is saying something doesn’t mean that it is true but it can be spread around as truth.

If everyone can do something, it is no longer rare enough to pay for

I agree with this, if everyone is posting the news to their blogs, social networking site, or the newspaper’s own website, what would be the purpose of going out and buying a paper?

And to ask the question of who is a journalist? Journalists are the people that are getting paid to write their stories, not the blogger who is working out of their parents’ basement, writing their opinions.

At first I thought this was going to be about the evils of Facebook and Twitter. I was relieved to see that this article was about their positive aspects. I have used Facebook for a while and while I do not follow any news stories through their I do get info on TV programs and books that are coming out.

“Maybe in earlier eras [news organizations] needed proof of concept to do anything; now nobody’s waiting for proof of concept”

This quote is from the beginning of the article, I definitely agree with it and think that this is something that should be fixed if news organizations are going to continue using social networking sites.

If they want to be trusted and have a greater number of followers, they are going to have to have proof of what they are saying it true. No one is going to listen to someone who only gets their facts right half of the time. It will only take one time of someone repeating their false information and making a fool of themselves to get them to move on to another source.

So if the number of people using Twitter and Facebook to get their news is indeed on the rise, then these news groups are going to have to come up with a new way of verifying information quicker.

And of course to make life easier they posted a way to link the story to your Facebook or Twitter account. Ridiculous.